Top Tips for Successful Japanese Desktop Publishing

February 10, 2014

Japanese is one of the most requested
Asian languages for translation. Though many companies contact
their preferred language provider for the Japanese translation, they often
attempt to complete the desktop publishing (formatting) by their
internal marketing or design teams, usually as a cost-savings
measure. Often these teams do not speak Japanese, nor do they fully
understand the typesetting requirements of the language. In the
end, the client spends more time and money trying to get the
Japanese right. In this blog, I talk about some of the formatting
challenges in Japanese and provide a few tips to ensure a
successful Japanese desktop publishing project.

Plan
Ahead

When planning a project in Japanese, it is important to have
the right resources for the job, including a team of experienced
desktop publishers (artists) who are knowledgeable in the language
and the software.

When translating from English into Japanese, the text will
contract instead of expand unlike some European languages. It is
important to keep this in mind when you are designing your
document.

It is important to consider the fonts that you are using in the
design. Does the layout contain unique, stylized English fonts? You
may not get the same affect with a Japanese font. It is recommended
that you review the available Japanese fonts and choose suitable
fonts for the project. Make sure that they are properly installed
on your system.

After Translation

Carefully review the overall layout of the Japanese document
for improper line breaks, widows or orphans. (In typesetting, widows
and orphans are words or text strings at the
beginning or end of a paragraph, which are left dangling at the top
or bottom of a column, separated from the rest of the paragraph.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans)

Line breaks are particularly challenging in Japanese as some of
the characters cannot appear in the beginning of the line. These
include:

The following is an example of incorrect placement of the long
dash.
It is incorrect to put long dashes at the beginning of lines as
circled below.

The correct way is to move the long dash to the end of the
previous line. Alternatively, you can bring down a character from
the previous line to make the long dash appear as the second
character in that line.

The following are examples of using smaller hiragana or
katakana characters.
It is incorrect to put these smaller characters like
っ、ェ、ッ at the
beginning of the lines.

You can adjust the kerning to move these characters to the
previous line, or add soft returns to move the characters down from
the previous line. Samples of correct usage follow.

Like Chinese and other Asian languages, widows and orphans are
not permitted in Japanese layouts. Please see the sample below.
When this happens, you can adjust the kerning or the size of the
text box to correct the issue.

Changes to >>

For English and European languages, you can simply press
B or type Ctrl + B to apply the
bold style to text. However for Japanese, it doesn't give you a
real bold effect if you apply the same technique. It actually makes
the selected characters appear twice with a slight shift, just like
making a same color shadow behind it. Therefore it is suggested
that you use a Japanese font with a heavier weight to achieve the
real bold effect.

It is common practice for an artist to use the same type size
as the original English text in the localized Japanese version. The
Japanese characters however tend to be bigger than the English even
in the same type size. There is not a tremendous difference in the
body copy, but for larger headings or titles, the difference can be
considerable. You may want to go ahead and use a smaller type size
in this case for the Japanese.

GPI's Multilingual Desktop Publishing Services

Globalization Partners International
provides many services including document translation and website translation both of
which involve multilingual desktop publishing services. This list
below highlights some of the more common applications we use for
documentation localization projects:

Comments

On Jul 15, Pauline Bell said:Dear Nicholas,I am trying to publish a book of photos and Japanese Haiku which has English and Japanese text in. I have a bit of a problem knowing which text to use as it looks like they can be enormously expensive. Could you possibly advice me what the situation is if I am going to publish a book and would wish to buy a font. I see they are different prices but don't know which catogary I would fall into.I need one that is like Japanese handwriting...and wonder if you might know a free one, (or one that isn't too expensive)..I do not speak Japanese and the text will mostly be on top of photos so will be in an Image format.I would be very grateful for any advice, thanks so much. At present the text is in ASKaiSho-Bd regular which I can access on my Windows7PC.Any help you can throw my way will be so gratefully received, thankyou.Pauline Bell

On Jul 16, Nicolas Carcano said:Thanks for your comment. You are right, most of the professional Japanese fonts are expensive. I recommend you search in Google using “Free handwriting Japanese fonts” and you will find several websites from independent designers whereby you can find and download free fonts for your book. Best of luck!

Nicolás Cárcano - Desktop Publishing SpecialistA native speaker of Spanish, Nicolás has expert skills on both
Mac and PC platforms with many DTP applications including Adobe
Tech Comm Suite, specifically structured and unstructured
FrameMaker, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and others. He also
has advanced skills in Microsoft Office products like PowerPoint
and Word, as well as Quark.